Working Romance: Talia Hibbert's UNTOUCHABLE and Lola Keeley's THE MUSIC AND THE MIRROR

RNFF is back from a summer hiatus, and is thinking about romance in the workplace. I just read a contemporary romance that I had major problems in the way it addressed (or waved its hands at, instead of addressing) issues of power and consent in a employer/employee setting. Or in this case, a college professor/undergraduate student relationship. No matter than the professor was actually a graduate student just on the verge of defending her dissertation, and the student was a professional athlete going back to school to earn the final credits for his bachelor's degree after leaving college to go pro years earlier. The two are instantly drawn to one another even before their first class together, and soon start socializing outside of class, and then burning up the sheets between classes. Neither one thinks of solutions to the forbidden romance: transferring to a different section; dropping the class altogether; informing a supervisor about the relationship, and asking for a different grad student or professor to grade the student's work. They just keep sleeping together, and dismiss the idea that there is anything problematic about the situation. Did the author think that because the woman was the person in power, and the man in the subordinate position, that the situation wasn't worth fretting about? If so, she might want to check out this recent New York Times article about a female professor who has been reprimanded for harassing a male student.

Even if the #metoo and #TimesUp movements have made workplace romances less common (a February 2018 CareerBuilders' survey cites the figure at 36%, down from 41% in 2017 and 40% in 2008), a sizable number of Americans still meet romantic partners at the office. Can romance novels depict such romances, but in a way that takes into account the concerns raised by #metoo and #TimesUp?

In Talia Hibbert's Untouchable, the workplace setting isn't an office, but a home. Thirty year old Hannah Kabbah always dreamed of a job working with children. But a conviction for maliciously damaging the car of her sister's secret (and abusive) boyfriend scuttled those plans long ago. But after running into former schoolmate Nate Davis and his two kids, all of whom are desperately in need of a nanny, Hannah gets a second chance to do what she loves. Only complication: her adolescent crush on Nate is turning into a mature, adult longing for the former angry bad boy turned into really kind guy. And Nate's pretty drawn to grumpy, direct Hannah, too ("The earth hadn't moved, when her skin had brushed his. The stars hadn't aligned, and his heart hadn't pounded its way right out of his chest. It only felt that way" [Kindle Loc 1162]).

But Nate is Hannah's employer, something he is aware of almost every time he finds himself thinking sexy thoughts about the quirky, curvy woman who is taking care of his children:

...but for some reason she held back her irritation. No; not some reason. She held it back because they weren't at school, and she wasn't just some girl he watched with interest from afar. She was his employee, and she was cautious around him. He had power over her, and she remembered that, even if he didn't." (1745)

The situation is triply complicated, both by the fact that Hannah is of African descent, while Nate is of European, and that Hannah suffers from biological depression, while Nate has long since recovered from the situational depression he experienced after the death of his wife years earlier. But after months of keeping their polite distance, interspersed with vivid moments of heart-stopping attraction, Nate can't keep his feelings to himself any longer (especially because his standoffishness is apparently hurting Hannah's feelings):

"Because I'm not that kind of guy! I don't lust after women who work for me! I don't spend hours thinking about women I can't have and shouldn't want. I don't take advantage of people—I don't even think about it. But I can't stop thinking of you. And dreaming of you, and wishing I could touch you, and tryin to make you smile—and you want to tell me it'll blow over? Do you know how many times in the last few years I've wished I could want someone like this? I didn't think I could! And now it's you, and I shouldn't, and I—fuck!" (2563)


After Nate's confession, Nate and Hannah have to openly discuss what they will do about their mutual attraction. And how they will negotiate the power dynamics inherent in an employer who is sleeping with his employee. And how they will explain the situation to Hannah's family and friends, all of whom are quite protective of the woman who declares to all that she can well-protect herself, thank you very much. And ultimately, both realize that the only way forward is to make a choice: to be an employer and employee, OR to be a couple. There is no both/and possible here, not if their romantic relationship is to have a chance of being an equitable one.



Lola Keeley's debut novel, The Music and the Mirror, approaches the workplace romance from a different angle altogether. The workplace in question here is even more un-office-like than in Untouchable: a professional ballet company. Twenty-one-year-old dancer Anna Gale is in awe of everything and everyone at the Metropolitan Performing Arts Center—especially the company's legendary artistic director, Victoria Ford. Victoria's dancing inspired a far younger Anna to devote her own life to ballet, and Anna has long nursed a crush on the greatest ballerina in modern history. Having the chance to work professionally with her idol is almost more than Anna can believe.

Victoria (a white woman, like Anna), is the only woman in the world to work as the artistic director of a major ballet company, a job that requires her to be tougher than old leather. She's in almost constant pain due to her career-ending injury, something else Victoria will never allow anyone else to see. No, Victoria is all Ice Queen. Which Anna finds out when her cell phone rings, interrupting her very first rehearsal:

"The charity case. Of course. Just another millennial who thinks the centuries-long history of ballet owes them any career they bother to pick up for themselves. This is what happens when people fawn over your first tutu and tell you that you're special, Anya." (193)

But despite her "corny-as-Kansas exterior," Anna contains a "glint of steel" (892). Victoria may think she can humiliate her, but Anna is used to dancing for her career, which "feels a whole lot like dancing for her life." Rather than stumble through a difficult routine that Victoria dictates she demonstrate before she is dismissed from the company, Anna blocks out the audience and makes the steps hers as soon as she starts to move.

Which impresses the hell out of Victoria, though Victoria would be the last one to admit it. What she does do, though, is even more shocking—she offers Anna a principal role in one of the season's upcoming ballets. It could be seen as the move of a boss seeking to influence an employee to impart sexual favors—if roles at the company were not so clearly given because of talent, rather than favoritism. Other dancers protest at Anna's sudden promotion, but none can gainsay Victoria's decision after watching Anna dance. Or after seeing how hard Victoria makes Anna practice, extra private lessons on top of her regular work with the rest of the corps. What looks to be nearly abuse to the average person is a reason for determination and pride in a professional ballet dancer: "Something in the way Victoria's never happy and never quite lets up makes Anna feel like she can dance right through the floorboards if she has to" (1119). And makes the crush Anna's still nursing on almost-forty Victoria even more potent—and even more hopeless.

It's been twelve years since Victoria's dancing career ended, but her ambition is as fierce as ever. She's always believed that ambition leaves no room for the feelings for others ("Perhaps Victoria shouldn't invest much time in this girl who'll stab Anna in the back for her shot, but it's not a failing, not where Victoria is concerned. She respects a fell shark at work. It's just Anna who mistakes them all for dolphins" [3825]). But somehow she finds herself drawn to Anna in spite of their differences. Anna manages to combine breathtaking talent with a sunny, and bone-kind, temperament, all wrapped up in direct, blunt way of speaking that is far different than the deferential way in which most of the rest of the company treats Victoria. And slowly, so very slowly, the girl who looks like the sun pulls the ice queen into her orbit of her trust and care.

Anna worries that being Victoria's romantic partner means keeping their relationship a secret. But Victoria surprises her:

     "You, the one who likes to assume things, are assuming you're m dirty little secret?"
     Anna nods. What else could she possibly think?
     .....
     "Well," [Victoria] considers out loud. "Fuck that."
     "Ex-excuse me?" Thank God Anna has finished her coffee, or it would be all over Victoria's immaculate brushed-linen bedding.
     "Oh yes, it's quite the sapphic scandal." Victoria rolls her eyes. "Do you know how many men in my position have fucked their way to greatness? Claiming an exceptional dancer as their muse and riding her talent to fame or their own? Not," she clarifies, "that it's what I intend with you."
     "You're already way more renowned," Anna points out.
     "Well, of course I am. All I mean is that no one ever judged those men and their muses. Often the fights were more dramatic than the performances, but it never stopped them. Why the hell else are we in the arts, if not to shrug off that pedestrian bullshit?" (5077)

Rather than reject their relationship, or hide it, Victoria and Anna own it. They don't go around announcing it to everyone in the company. But they don't hide it either, especially after Anna experiences an injury during practice. And the company's members are soon speculating about their "official start date," for the betting pool they've all been running about when the two would finally take the plunge. No one, it seems, is as surprised by this romantic development as are Anna and Victoria. And no one worries that Anna is taking advantage of Victoria, or Victoria of Anna. They all work too hard, and too much under each others' eyes, for any sexual favoritism or misconduct to be tolerated. Neither is fucking her way to greatness; each is talented enough in her own self, ambitious enough for her own self, for their romantic relationship to be regarded as problematic, by themselves or by their peers.

Added bonuses: cool gender flipping of ballet roles; the celebration rather than denigration of female ambition; and a climax that takes an unusual, but deeply satisfying turn. Not to mention a compelling present-tense narration with tons of detail about the world of professional ballet. I'm no balletomane myself, but I'd say that The Music and the Mirror is one of the best romances I've read all year.

Photo credits:

heart/keyboard: Sharp Heels

Nanny t-shirt: T-Public

Ballerina in black tutu: Photo by Jamie Mink on Unsplash

Ballet slippers: Photo by Donald Giannatti on Unsplash

Talia Hibbert

Untouchable

(Ravenswood #2)

Nixon House, 2018

Lola Keeley

The Music & the Mirror

Ylva Publishing, 2018

Equal Opportunity Violence: Sexual Assault and Lorelie Brown's HER HOMETOWN GIRL

When you hear the word "rape," what images of victims and perpetrators first jump into your mind? I've not been the victim of such a crime myself, and I don't involuntarily place myself in the first role. But I do tend to imagine a woman as the victim, and a man as the perpetrator.

Romance novels featuring characters who have experienced sexual assault tend to follow this same pattern: a woman as victim of a male perpetrator. I've seen the occasional romance with a man in the role as victim, but the perpetrator remains male.

Lorelie Brown's Her Hometown Girl is the first romance I've ever read in which the victim and the perpetrator have both been women.

Brown's novel opens with twenty five-year-old white schoolteacher Tansy Graves breaking down in the chair at Belladonna Ink, where she's in the midst of getting her first tattoo. Earlier that day, Tansy was supposed to have married her lesbian lover, Jody—a plan she ditched after she witnessed Jody "banging the [male] caterer's assistant right before the ceremony. And we're lesbians" (Kindle Loc 27). Thirty-nine-year-old Chinese-American tattoo artist Cai not only feels bad for wounded, insecure Tansy; she also finds her immensely attractive. Cai's instincts are to try and protect this wounded bird, especially when a not-so-contrite Jody comes searching for her fiancée. But Cai knows better than to interfere in a complete stranger's life. She may see signs that Jody is an unfeeling control-freak, but "then, I don't know their dynamic. Maybe this is the fifth time they've been through this dance. All things considered, I'm pretty helpless. This isn't my fight to pick" (page 11).

We get both Cai's and Tansy's points of view in this dual first-person narrative. And so when Tansy returns to her apartment with Jody, only intending to spend the night before moving out, readers witness firsthand the sexual assault an under-the-influence-of Xanax Tansy experiences at Jody's hands. A scene that feels both horrific and necessary, to not just tell, but to show potentially disbelieving readers that yes, female-on-female sexual assault can and does happen. Far more often than most readers might imagine: according to the Human Rights Campaign, which cites a 2010 survey by the CDC on intimate partner sexual violence, 44 percent of lesbians experienced rape, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner (compared to 35 percent of heterosexual women). Rape is not only about a penis forcibly entering a vagina without consent, something that Brown's story insists readers understand and begin to acknowledge.

A difficult thing, something that even Tansy has trouble doing. Though she follows through on her resolve to leave Jody, she cannot bring herself to talk to anyone about Jody's sexual abuse. Not even Cai, whom she befriends, and then begins to date, six weeks after her breakup. Tansy is just starting to understand that Jody's behavior was less about love, and more about her need to manipulative and control: "I'm from Idaho, and the adjustment to Cal State Fullerton was overwhelming. . .  [Jody] set herself up as my rescuer, told me no one would ever understand me the way she did, and they wouldn't want me anyway" (20). And she's only just beginning to rewrite the story that Jody instilled in her, a story in which she was the messed-up, but fortunate, recipient of cool and calm Jody's "care":

It's so weird. No one wants to hear about my random bits of school teacher knowledge. Jody helped me tone that part of myself down and be more interesting. Unless she didn't. Unless she was actually just ruining me. (32).

Brown's narrative shows just how difficult it can be for a person who has been the victim of a manipulative, abusive intimate partner to react "normally" with a non-abusive partner. Tansy keeps waiting for the other shoe to drop, for Cai to casually demean her, or undercut her choices, or to guilt her into acting the way Cai wants her to, rather than the way Tansy wishes to. Recovering from abuse is especially difficult for a person like Tansy, who craves being appreciated, who likes being chased, and who is just beginning to discover that she enjoys being sexually submissive (something Brown makes clear is far different than being sexually abused).

"After . . . after the way things used to be, shouldn't I want to be calling the shots and be the one who starts everything?" a confused Tansy asks Cai after they engage in some dominance/submission sexual play (129). Even though Tansy's words make Cai suspect what Tansy may have suffered, Cai doesn't push; instead, she simply "takes what she's offered me and no more. 'Whatever you're doing is the way it's supposed to be. No matter if that was standing on street corners wearing a clown costume and turning somersaults'" (129). Cai's experienced her own share of trauma, albeit of a far different kind, and understands that each person must come to terms with it in her own way, and in her own time.

But when Tansy and Cai begin to introduce more power play into their sexual relationship, something that turns Tansy on when she thinks about it sends her into a panic attack when played out in reality. Which is not something Cai, nor Tansy, can simply ignore. Not if their relationship is going to survive Tansy's moving back home to her native Idaho.

As Evan Urquhart notes in "Female-on-Female Sexual Violence is Real and Awful," "While there have been a respectable number of articles written about lesbian sexual violence, the reality of this problem doesn't seem to have fully penetrated into most people's awareness." He theorizes that this may be because the LGBTQ community has been so focused on marriage equality, advocacy for which might be undermined by addressing the problem of sexual abuse in queer relationships. I'd also hazard it has a lot to do with the dominant conception of rape in the heterosexual community, one that can see rape only if a male sex organ is involved.

Her Hometown Girl may go a little way towards address this lack of awareness in the romance-reading community, even as it tells an emotionally involving, and ultimately joyful story of two women falling in love.


Word quotes: Marie Claire

Lorelie Brown

Her Hometown Girl

A Belladonna Ink novel

Riptide, 2017

Romancing the Rings: Olympics Romances by Rachel Spangler and Tamsen Parker

With the opening ceremonies of the 2018 Winter Olympics taking place today, a post on Olympic-set romances seems more than in order. Luckily, many romance authors have penned and published love stories set against the backdrop of fictionalized winter sports competitions in celebration, several with clearly feminist themes.

My favorites to date are by lesbian romance author Rachel Spangler, and erotic romance writer Tamsen Parker. Spangler's a new-to-me author, while Parker's an old book friend, and I've enjoyed reading their stories this week in preparation for the real-life athletic contests to come.

Spangler's Edge of Glory features two athletes who belong to the same athletic association—the USSA (United States Ski & Snowboard)—but who have very little else in common. After a long and successful career in the upcoming sport of snowboard cross, thirty-year-old Corey LaCroix is spending as much time fending off questions about retirement as she is training for the upcoming Olympics. The sport's become far more regimented, far less free-spirited than it was when she she was a carefree 18-year-old winning her first gold medal, and she's wondering whether her own freewheeling days of hearty partying and sleeping with any woman eager to fall into her bed are—or should be—behind her, too.

Like the sport she loves, Corey has a reputation for being laid back and rule wary. A happy likable jokester, Corey's always been able to charm anyone who crossed her path. But she has her work cut out for her when twenty-five year-old Elise Brandeis, Ice Princess of the ski slopes, arrives to train at the "Lake Henry" New York Olympic training center the summer before the next winter games. Spending a year off the slopes after a knee-tearing crash has Elise chomping at the bit, ready to begin serious training again. And she's determined nothing—especially not a cocky, undisciplined, court-jester of a woman like Corey LaCroix—will distract her from making the Olympic team.

Spangler crafts a slow-to-develop romance, as these two opposites gradually become friends before they test the waters of sexual compatibility. Although lines like these—"Elise's droll comments probably put a lot of people off, but [Corey] didn't mind having her chops busted by beautiful women. She preferred sass to sycophants any day" (Kindle Loc 1324)—made this reader more than willing to hang in there and watch the sparks fan into flame.

Spangler's true gift as a writer is her strong, nuanced character development, creating both primary and secondary characters that move far beyond the feel-good human interest bio stories we get during the typical television Olympic broadcasts. Though it's obvious from the story's start that wound-too-tight Elise could benefit from a bit of Corey's sheer joy in life, friendship, and competition, it never makes Corey the key to Elise's salvation; instead, Elise learns from her coach, from an upcoming snowboarder, and Corey's sister and trainer, as well as Elise, that being a world-class competitor does not mean you can't have any friends, and that joy, not anger, is what sustains a person through the long haul of a bid for the Olympics.

Corey's self-explorations are more bittersweet. Always one to live in the moment, she finds it nearly impossible to even consider what her life might be like if she's no longer is able to—or has the desire to—compete, never mind make plans for that inevitability. After a career built on risk-taking, can Corey really give it all up? And if she does, what will she have left?

Can two highly competitive women at two very different places in their athletic careers, forge a relationship that lasts beyond the highs (and lows) of the Winter Games?

In contrast to Spangler's long contemporary Olympic romance, Tamsen Parker has penned not two, not three, but five short Olympic-set romances. The length of these Snow & Ice Games books is far shorter than most of the romances Parker has written in the past, which makes for a sometimes frustrating experience for readers familiar with the fully-developed plots and characters of her earlier work. But publishing a series of books that feature not just heterosexual couples, or just gay couples, or just lesbian couples, as market forces typically demand, but one in which, as in real life, all three types of couples play leading roles, is well worth celebrating, even if one might wish to spend more time luxuriating in each couple's story.

For me, this week's installment of Parker's "Snow and Ice Games" was On the Edge of Scandal, the third book in the series. It's one of the three hetero romances of the group, featuring a woman hockey player who is growing increasingly frustrated with the obnoxious behavior of her long-time boyfriend. Brody's come to the Games to support college senior Bronwyn, even though he didn't make the men's hockey team as he had hoped to. Which Bron knows is "super sweet. It was. What's less sweet is that I feel like he wants me to hand him a goddamn cookie for it every time I see him" (Kindle Loc 45). Brody spends his time mouthing off in the stands ("She's not bad for a girl, right?"), calling Bron "Winnie" (a nickname she hates), and getting pissy and demanding when he's not allowed in the Olympic Village to sleep in Bron's bed.

All of which drives Bronwyn's Olympic coach, twenty seven-year-old Asher Levenson, to teeth-gnashing. Especially because he's been fighting off a stupid crush on Bron for the past two years. During the regular season Bron may play for BC, not for the BU team he coaches, but even crushing on a competitor is a no-no. Never mind on a player he's in the middle of coaching.

Ash, unlike privileged, attention-hound Brody, understand that Bron has to make her own decisions, even if one of those decisions is putting up with a romantic partner who doesn't grant her half the respect he knows she deserves. And so he doesn't interfere, even when Brody pulls him into a pissing match over Bron.

But when Brody's small slights and minor betrayals transform into one major, and very public, mistake, Ash is hardly crying in his coffee when Bron finally gives Brody the heave-ho he deserves.

But dumping a guy you've been with for eight years leaves a big hole a person's life, a hole that only grows larger as the tension of the SIG games increases. Ash promises to give Bron whatever she needs in order to get through this difficult time, and keep her, and the team, on track for the gold. How can Bron confide that her go-to form of stress relief has always been human contact?

Parker does fabulous work in the first third of the novel showing how a smart, competitive young woman can convince herself (or be trained by gender expectations to accept) that a boyfriend's sexist treatment is just par for the course: "If I were the bitchy and vindictive type, I could point out that while they may not be bruisers like he is, the people on those buses actually made their SIG teams, so maybe he should shut up. But I'll be good, be nice" (323). I especially cheered after reading this line, one of the few times in a romance novel where the word "feminism" isn't used as a straw-man whip to chastise the behavior of a romantically-inclined woman: "His sexist ranting pisses me off, but I don't have time to lecture him on feminism. Again" (140).

Olympic Village sex is safe sex: 37 condoms per athlete handed out
to the 2018 Winter Olympians, according to South China Morning Post

The latter parts of the story are more complicated, featuring as it does a growing romantic and sexual attachment between a player and a coach. Many a reader (and many a feminist) might find such a relationship problematic. Parker, however, takes the stance that while such rules may be be designed to protect girls, they can also function to infantilize adult women, policing their sexual choices in a way that is equally beholden to patriarchal norms. As Bronwyn tells Ash after he apologizes for "taking advantage of her" during a mutually-instigated kiss:

"You know, I'm really fucking tired of dudes telling me what I should do. I don't mind it on the ice, because you know what you're talking about and I trust you out there, but in here? Do you really think I'd be here if I didn't want to be? Do you think I would be lying in a bed with you if I felt like you were manipulating me? I don't. If anything, I feel bad because you're probably feeling guilty for betraying your professional moral code." (1367)

I'm really interested to hear other readers' thoughts on the way Bronwyn and Ash's romance plays out, in public and in private. And responses to the other books in Parker's series, which may not be as overtly feminist as On the Edge of Scandal, but which are just as deliciously readable.

What are your favorite Olympic-set romances?


Photo credits:
Snowboarder: Ski-BUMS
Skier Julia Mancuso training: Wall Street Journal
BU vs. BC women's hockey: SBNATION
Olympic condoms: Cosmopolitan

Rachel Spangler

Edge of Glory: A Romance

Bywater Books, 2017

Tamsen Parker

On the Edge of Scandal

Snow & Ice Games book #3

SMP Swerve/St. Martin's, 2018

Tropes and Tone: Lorelie Brown's FAR FROM HOME

When you begin to read a romance that draws on a familiar plot trope, do you have expectations not only about what will happen in the book, but also about the tone in which those events will be conveyed? When I picked up Lorelie Brown's RITA nominated short contemporary romance Far From Home and saw that it drew on the "marry for a green card" trope, I was expecting a light, funny read, á la the film Green Card and other similar romantic comedies that update the marriage of convenience trope for modern times. So when I began to read, I was surprised to discover that Far From Home isn't a comedy at all. Rather than have her two protagonists marry for convenience and then gradually, comically fall in love when they are forced into far more intimacy than a typically dating couple would experience, Brown uses a realistic, even at times melancholy, tone to explore several rather weighty issues: sexual identity; immigration rules and regulations; interracial relationships; mental health and recovery from addiction.

"I would marry you," says Rachel Fizel, the white first person narrator of Brown's romance, in the book's opening line. Rachel makes her joking offer in response to Pari Sadashiv, a friend of a friend who has come to Los Angeles from India courtesy of a H-1B work visa but would far prefer to be an independent consultant than remain with her current employer. Rachel's friends all assume her offer must be a joke; though she doesn't date much now, Rachel spent her teen years seeking approval by sleeping with a long series of guys ("poor vaginal choices," is her wry description of this period in her life [Kindle Loc 289]). But later at the party they are both attending, Pari, a "gold-star lesbian," seeks Rachel out, asking if she's perchance bisexual, and if the "large bills and a job that doesn't keep up" might just be incentive enough for Rachel to change her joking offer into a real one (104).

Rachel suddenly senses that this could be a life-changing moment, just like the moment when she finally admitted to her best friend, Nikki, that she had an eating disorder. Her job at a small studio doesn't really pay enough for her to keep up with the loans she accrued while earning her MFA in film, and it would be nice really to share expenses with another person. Especially a person as self-assured as Pari; maybe some of that young woman's assuredness will rub off on her, Rachel wishes.

Though she's typically reluctant to take chances, Rachel decides that it might be worth her time to go on a date with the elegant, composed, and occasionally minx-ish Pari. A date which quickly leads to an engagement. Which in turn leads to the arrival of Pari's mother, Niharika, from India, intent on planning a large, traditional Tamil wedding. And taking up quarters in Pari's two-bedroom apartment, forcing Rachel and Pari into the same bedroom. And the same bed.

Despite the myriad comic (and painfully stereotypical) possibilities of the above situation, Brown doesn't play her story for laughs. Instead, she allows us deep inside Rachel's head, showing how her distant parents and own "craving to be noticed" and "abhorrence of feeling superfluous" have shaped her starkly judgmental view of herself ("I'm aware that I'm medically still too skinny at the same time that I feel fat as a cow" [791]). And how her admiration of Pari, which initially takes the form of wishing she were more like her confident roommate ("Maybe if I was her, I wouldn't have to be me"), gradually transforms into an appreciation of Pari's intelligence, drive, and love of her own body and the pleasures it offers her. And an appreciation of the ways in which Pari forces her/allows her to pull down her protective guard, showing her real self, rather than the self Rachel constantly constructs to win the approval of others. And, finally, an appreciation of her own budding sexual desire, desire which only burgeons when she can engage in sex with a partner with whom she is emotionally as well as physically intimate.

But falling in love, even when that falling is mutual, puts a lot of pressure on a person. Pressure that Rachel, still prone to the self-doubts and self-hatred common to those who suffer from anorexia, does not want to admit she's feeling. Pressure that only mounts as the day of her wedding to Pari grows closer and closer. Will Pari's family, as tight-knit and loving as her family is distant and cold, accept her if they see that her anorexia is not fully under her control? Will Pari still love her if she's still sick?

Despite (or perhaps because of) thwarting my comic expectations, Far From Home proved a deeply satisfying read, a romance that doesn't shy away from important issues, but which never allows them to subsume the heart of any good marriage-of-convenience romance: how two people who thought only to help one another unexpectedly find themselves falling in love.

Photo credits:

Mendhi: I Love India.com

Lorelie Brown

Far From Home

A Belladonna Ink Novel

Riptide, 2016

Laughing at the Tragic Lesbian Romance Ending: Siera Maley's DATING SARAH COOPER

The romance community tends to agree that a romance is not really a romance if it doesn't end happily, or at least end "happily for now." How, then, can a subgenre of romance have a trope that's all about the unhappy ending?

When that subgenre is lesbian romance films. And perhaps Young Adult lesbian romance novels, too?

As blogger Danielle on The Radical Notion blog argues in "The Curse of the Tragic Lesbian Ending," the majority of lesbian romance films conclude with decidedly un-HEA moments:

Victims of the "Dead Lesbians" TV trope

If you identify as queer, you're lucky if you've got a handful of decent films to choose from, and even luckier if one or two of those films don't end with the protagonist dying, going to jail, or ending up alone. I can't tell you how many lesbian romances I've watched that have ended with one of the female characters meeting some awful fate.

The situation in young adult books with lesbian characters isn't quite so bad, at least in the books I've read. But still, the HEA, or even a HFN ending, is far from the norm.

Something that #ownvoices author Siera Maley takes dead aim at in Dating Sarah Cooper.

The premise behind Maley's novel is both high-concept and potentially cringe-worthy. On her way home from school in small-town Georgia, Katie Hammontree interrupts a football player bullying a fellow classmate, Jake, for being gay. Jake ends up with a split lip as a result of the encounter, and Katie invites Jake into her house to help clean him up. And invites her bestie, Sarah Cooper, over to help, since Sarah intends to go to nursing school after graduation next year. Jake, mistaking Katie and Sarah for girlfriends because of their playful physical closeness, invites them to come to a meeting of an unnamed school club to which he belongs: "if you guys ever wanted more people to hang out with and talk to and stuff... or if you just wanted to hang out with me and talk, you could come. You know, if you felt like spending time with people who can relate to you" (21). The girls, friendly but oblivious, accept. But when they find out from Jake just before stepping into the meeting that the club is a support group for gay students, impulsive Sarah decides to go with it. Dragging a reluctant Katie behind her, Sarah announces to the other students "Katie and I have been dating for about two months now, and we're ready to tell the world" (43).

Sarah's justification for her impetuous declaration is that it's a great way to get the guy she's been crushing on to notice her. "Guys like lesbians, right? And they also like challenges" (46). And because she and Katie are far more popular than the rest of the queer kids at school, "we'll be majorly boosting the confidence of the kids in that LGBT club" (46). Katie, worried about humiliating Jake and about being accused of making fun of the rest of the club, reluctantly decides to go along with Sarah's deception.

After Sarah and Katie out themselves to the wider school community, they learn a lot about what the queer kids in their school have to face every day. Word was that lesbians have it easy, especially compared to queer boys; homosexual boys get physically bullied, but everyone likes a lesbian, right? In fact, the straight boys like a lesbian a little too much: "Hey, Katie. Heard about you and Sarah... so what's that like and where do I buy tickets?"

Colton was the first of many, many guys that day who felt the need to gawk at us, tell us we were hot, announce their approval, or all three. We got questions about threesomes, questions about what we did in bed—all of which were completely invasive and inappropriate and absolutely qualified as "rude"—and questions about which one of us was the man in our relationship. We were whistled at, catcalled at, stared at, and shouted after, and I got called a "dyke" twice in casual conversation.  (57)

And that doesn't even mention the sexually harassing text and email messages that start arriving on both girls' phones. And the difficult conversation Katie has to have with her ex-boyfriend, with whom she broke up a few months earlier, appeasing his fears that he "turned her" gay. And the need to prove to a doubting fellow LAMBDA member that she and Sarah really are dating by kissing Sarah in the middle of a meeting.

That latter one is really the kicker for Katie, because "kissing Sarah just once had felt better than all of the hundreds of times I'd kissed Austin combined" (98). Might she really be gay? "What if my perfect boyfriend was actually a girlfriend? And how on earth was I supposed to know if that was the case?" (137)

Even worse, if Katie is gay, is she destined to be like one of the heroines of the lesbian romances that Sarah has been reading and watching for "research," a loser who falls in love with her straight best friend only to be doomed to rejection? As Sarah describes the pattern,

"Book number 1: one of the girls realizes she's straight. Book number 2: one of the girls realizes she's bi and loves a guy, and the other girl ends up alone. Book number 3: they both get murdered by vampires.... No matter what I picked up, there was always someone who got screwed over. I didn't want to end up like that. (242)

Neither does Katie. But one of these best friends is going to have to start being honest with the other if this book is going to have the happy, rather than tragic, ending promised by its comic tone.


In  "From Problem to Pride," Blogger Daisy Porter suggests that there are three types of YA books with queer characters:

• The gay problem novel, in which a queer character comes to terms with their own sexuality, the sexuality of a relative, or deals with coming out of the closet
• The "gaytopia" novel, in which being queer is not a problem
• The "Big Gay Book," in which queerness is the focus, but in a celebratory, rather than problematic way

Porter's first category includes many lesbian protagonists. But the "gay" in the "gaytopia" and "Big Gay Book" categories is telling; girls who love girls still rarely feature in novels in which being a lesbian is not a problem, or in which lesbianism is celebrated.

While I can't say that I love the idea of holding up characters who, in Katie's words "manipulate and use a minority group for their own gain" (76) as heroines (Katie and Sarah get off pretty lightly when they finally admit their ruse), I can definitely get behind more lesbian YA romances with HEAs. Or even HFNs.


Photo/Illustration credits:
Dead Lesbians on TV: Autostraddle
"Hand Holding": Chaos Life

Siera Maley

Dating Sarah Cooper

indie published, 2014

Reading Goals for 2017?

Having packed up my daughter back to college after her long winter break, held my first Board meeting as President of the New England Chapter of Romance Writers of America, gotten a handle on the revisions of my novel-in-progress, and ordered the new part that our HVAC folks finally figured out we needed to fix the heating pump that had been failing intermittently for the last month (so hard to write when you're sitting in a freezing cold house!), I'm finally ready to start blogging again. I have a few books that I'm eager to write about, but before I started reviewing again, I wanted to take a few minutes to think out loud about my goals for my reading this year.

First, I want to try and remember to list on my Goodreads account every book I read. I've tended to put off adding a book to my "read" list until I have the time to write a full review—and when I run into a busy period, I end up forgetting to post a bunch of books I've read but have already taken back to the library, or which have fallen too low on my Kindle listings, displaced by ever-new titles, for the mere sight of the covers to remind me I still owe that review. This year, then, I'm going to add books to my "read" list on Goodreads immediately after I finish reading them, even if I don't have the time then to write a review. Hopefully this will be a better jog to my memory, and I'll follow up with those reviews. If you're a Goodreads person, I'd love to hook up with you there (just search for me under my name, "Jackie Horne." There's 7 of us on Goodreads; I'm the one from Cambridge MA USA).

Second, I want to read more lesbian romance. When I first reconnected to romance a little less than a decade ago, I hadn't read any romances with queer characters. But now, queer romance takes up a significant chunk of my TBR pile, thanks to recommendations from online friends, reviewers, and writers. But such recommendations often tend to feature protagonists who identify as male, or as non-binary, far more often than they do as protagonists who identify as lesbian. I need to make more of an effort to connect with lesbian publishers, readers, reviewers, and writers, because otherwise it is too easy to fall into the totally unsubstantiated assumption that gay and queer writers are turning out far more interesting romances than lesbian writers, just because those are the books that I and my friends and acquaintances are reading. So, at least once every month, I'm going to spend time reading through the upcoming publication lists at Bella Books, Bold Strokes Books, Riptide Publishing, and any other lesbian romance presses you all might recommend, and pick a handful of books to try.

One of the many book challenges you can join online
Link to POC Reading Challenge

Third, I want to expand the Diversity Romance Bingo Challenge that Barb Funes promoted on Twitter and Goodreads (which ended at the end of 2016) into this year. My goal: to get a bingo every month, which would mean reading at least five romances with characters or authors who are from groups or identities underrepresented in the romance genre, with a different underrepresented group or identity in each of the five.

Finally, I want to keep making an effort to read books by authors I don't yet know. Since starting this blog in 2012, I've been introduced to so many terrific feminist romance authors, and I could spend every blog post writing only about my favs. But I don't want to overlook new authors, or to miss the chance to discover older books that I didn't catch when they were first published. If I don't write about every book by your favorite feminist author, it's not because I'm not reading and enjoying them; it's because I want to keep my ears open for new voices, not only the well-established ones.

I hope you won't mind if I use the blog to help keep me focused on goals (especially goals 2 & 3): I plan to report once a month here about my progress, unexpected finds and annoying frustrations.


What are your romance reading goals for 2017? And do you have any recommendations for goals RNFF should consider?

Heather Rose Jones' DAUGHTER OF MYSTERY

Is Heather Rose Jones' Daughter of Mystery a lesbian romance? A work of historical fiction? A fantasy? An adventure story? A tale of court intrigue? After finishing the book earlier today, I'm not quite sure what genre to place it in. What I am certain, though, is that I closed the book with a distinct sense of feminist satisfaction.

Set in a Ruritania-like kingdom in the second decade of the 19th century, Daughter of Mystery is told through alternating third-person pov chapters of its two protagonists. Twenty-year-old Margerit Sovitre never imagined her sophisticated, wealthy, and distant godfather, Baron Saveze, would leave her much of anything after his death. But to her shock, his will proclaims Margerit heir to all his properties, holdings, goods, and monies excepting those linked to the title. Margerit's inheritance earns her not only the enmity of the new baron, who believes her new fortune rightly his own, but also the grudging protection of the old baron's armin, or bodyguard, a young woman known only by the name of Barbara.

Purchased as a young child by the baron, Barbara knows little of her own parentage. What she does know is that the baron arranged for her to trained as an armin despite her gender, and that her patron promised her she'd be a free woman after his death. To be listed as one of the "possessions" given to his new heir drives Barbara nearly mad. Margerit is equally appalled, and offers to free Barbara from her servitude. But the terms of the baron's will, as well as the refusal of Margerit's guardian uncle to allow her to give away any of her inheritance, tie the two young women together until both come of age.

Now just imagine one of those duelists as a woman...

Thus unfolds a wary dance of power and attraction between the two young women, one highly skilled in martial arts but without any financial or social power of her own; the other exploring her very real but still constrained financial power, but owing her safety to armin. Barbara and Margerit's slow-developing relationship takes place against the backdrop of court intrigue: the fictional country of Alpennia (situated, like Anthony Hope's Ruritania, in the midst of existing European countries without displacing any of them), like the elder Baron Saveze, is also in search of its next heir. Will the ruling Counsel declare the prince's underaged son, child of his second (and French) wife, the heir apparent? Or will his grandson, child of his eldest daughter by his first wife, but raised in Austria, be given the crown?

Margerit, enthralled by the chance to continue her academic studies at university, cares as much about state politics as she does about finding a potential mate, her purported reason for traveling to Rotenek, Alpennia's capital city. But Barbara, accustomed to the intrigues of the court from her years serving the baron, knows how dangerous it is to ignore the hidden messages behind seemingly kindly advances. And with the new Baron Saveze as deeply committed to helping the young princess and her son as he is to his plan for revenging himself against both Margerit and Barbara, can either young woman afford to turn her back on the duties of society, even if both would prefer a quiet life of scholarship?

Daughter of Mystery is decidedly short on sexy times. But it contains myriad other pleasures. Unsurprisingly, given the author's PhD. in Linguistics, the language used for the names, places, and ranks of Alpennia feels strikingly realistic, a compelling mixture of sounds that evoke French, Swiss, and Italian, with hints of German and Slovak: Margerit, Nikule, Giseltrut; Rotenek, Chalanz, Turinz; Maisetra, Mefro, Mesner. Even though I knew that the book was a work of fiction, its language sounded so right that I found myself wondering many times if it had been set in an actual European country that had somehow slipped my mind.

The English language used to relate the story of two Alpennian women is just as compelling as its invented one. After reading just the book's second paragraph, I knew I was in the hands of a gifted wordsmith:

     If the baron were less rich or less powerful, he would have been called an Eccentric, but Alpennian society didn't use that word of a man like the baron. As he was the only person sitting to dinner, and as it was neither one of his eccentricities to explain his plans to the lower servants nor to presume such exalted rank as to speak in the royal plural, the target of this remark appeared to be the motionless figure standing precisely one step behind and to the right of his chair. (Kindle Loc 61).

World-building and plotting are also strengths in Jones' writing. Careful readers will pick up on the clues dropped throughout the story about Barbara's parentage, but most will likely be surprised by the way Barbara's antecedents are interwoven with the current-day political wrangling about who will inherit Alpennia's crown. The book's fantasy elements (Alpennia is a land in which Thaumaturgy is not just an imaginary skill in a role-playing game, but an actual field of study, one pursued by Margerit and her fellow university students) make complete sense within the world Jones has created.

But what I enjoyed most was the gradual friendship, emotional connection, and at last, openly declared love that grew between experienced but vulnerable Barbara and unworldly but determined Margerit. Some claim that romances with same sex couples do not have to cope with the distressingly unequal power relations common to heterosexual relationships under patriarchy. Jones' story suggests, however, that differing levels of power are always being negotiated between potential romantic partners: social power, economic power, cultural capital, educational attainments and in-born gifts. The ability to come to terms with each other's greater (or lesser) power, even more than ability to fight the baron intent on their harm, is what makes Jones' heroines so utterly appealing, both as feminist role models and as romantic heroines.

Photo credits:

Prisoner of Zenda (1922): Movie Morlocks

Grey Thaumaturgy card: Patrick O'Duffy blog

 

Heather Rose Jones

Daughter of Mystery

Alpennia #1

Bella Books, 2014

Lesbian Romance By the Numbers?

In the comments to last week's post, "Do You Read Lesbian Romance?" a reader (thanks, Jill!) questioned the numbers I posted that the number of m/m romances published over the past five years to the number of lesbian romances published over the same period, numbers which I came by after doing a very quick search (via the "keyword" and "date" categories) on amazon.com. I've since gone back and done some additional searching, and refining of search terms.

Turns out, you get quite different results, depending on the search terms you use. Or whether you use quotation marks around your terms or not. Or whether, after your initial search, you refine your results (say, if you're looking for SF f/f romance, or Teen & Young Adult f/f romance).

Here are the figures for lesbian romance, using four different keywords to search.The second line shows the numbers if each category is then refined for "romance" or "lesbian romance." Not quite sure why "lesbian romance" is a subcategory of "lesbian romance," but it is...


          "f/f romance"  f/f romance  "lesbian romance"  lesbian romance 

2015:        23                  3,334              3,986                       13,901
                 17                  2,835              2,552                         2,527

2014:        29                  2,175              2,128                         9,069
                 27                  1,850              1,141                         1,117

2013:         3                   1,493              1,308                         4,817
                  1                   1,177                 698                            677

2012:         5                    1,436                833                         3,547          
                  5                    1,133                383                            369

2011:         0                      610                 418                        1,508
                                          406                 213                           207


Looking at the actual titles that turn up in each search, it's clear that if you search without using quotations marks around your search terms, you get a lot of heterosexual romances, not just lesbian romances. Not to mention a lot of other, completely-unrelated-to-romance things (Tchaikowsky's Romance in F Minor Op. 5, anyone?) But using quotation marks isn't all that better, especially if you use the relatively new term "f/f"; hetero romances come up in those searches, too.

Is this because Amazon allows authors to tag their books with their own keywords? And authors are putting in keywords that aren't really relevant to their titles?

It would be nice if Amazon allowed searchers to refine their search to exclude certain things (so you could differentiate romance from erotica, say, or from Tchaikovsky sheet music). But given the way search parameters are currently set up, this doesn't seem possible.

So, after compiling all these numbers, I'm feeling that they are ultimately not all that helpful in thinking about lesbian romance publication numbers, or LGBTQ numbers in general. In fact, they're pretty useless. So I'm not even going to bother to do a similar search on m/m or gay romance (with or without quotes).

Perhaps this kind of research is something that a larger organization has, or should, take on? I've sent an email to the Lambda Literary folks to check if they have done any investigating. If not, I think I'll be emailing RWA Board members to ask if their "Romance Industry Statistics" page might be updated with some additional research, so LGBTQIA books don't have to be the rainbow sheep of the romance family when it comes to statistics.

Unless any readers out there have other ideas about how to find accurate publication information on the number of lesbian, f/f, gay, m/m and other LGBTQIA romances are being published today?

Do You Read Lesbian Romance?

In putting together the RNFF Best of 2015 list, I was more than a little aware of the imbalance in my LGBTQ selections: 6 books with two male protagonists, but only one with two female lovers. This is due in large part to my own reading choices; I read far more gay male romances this past year than I did lesbian romances. Why, though, was that, precisely? I began to think about some of the reasons why this might be:

• Because there are more m/m romances being published than lesbian romances?

Nope. Turns out that a search of m/m romance published in 2015 (via amazon) turns up 12,112 titles, while a search for lesbian romance for the same period returns 14,002 titles.


• Because fewer lesbian romances are available as e-books, and thus tend to cost more?

Apparently not. Another amazon search for the period 2015, limiting the format to "Kindle edition" returns 10,180 m/m ebook romances, and 13,097 e-book lesbian romances.

• Because m/m romance is newer, the hot new thing, while lesbian romance has been around for the past 50 years?

Amazon hits for m/m romance published in the past five years, by year:
2015: 12,112
2014:   7,482
2013:   4,646
2012:   3,559
2011:   1,641


Amazon hits for lesbian romance published in the past five years, by year:
2015: 14,002
2014:   9,082
2013:   4,821
2012:   3,545
2011:   1,508

Pretty similar growth trajectories, no?


• Because, as lesbian romance author and publisher Radclyffe suggests in her essay during 2014's Queer Romance month, lesbian romance is a niche market, and hence far less visible to those outside its niche than are other types of romances?

A general Google search turns up 128 million entries for "m/m romance" but only 26 million for "lesbian romance." Yes, visibility is definitely an issue.

• Because lesbian romances are marketed primarily to lesbian audiences, while m/m romance has its eyes on female, as well as male, readers?

Don't know if there is a way to test this one out—perhaps by conducting a survey of publishers? Or of self-publishing authors? A project for the future, perhaps...

• Because lesbian romance as a genre dates back to the 1970s, and often follows the format of heterosexual romance from that period (i.e., short category romance a la Harlequin and Mills & Boon), while m/m romance, which emerged far later (around 2000?), was born in a time when the romance format was less restricted? And thus m/m romance often feels richer, character-wise, than lesbian romance?

My own far from thoroughly-tested theory, based on the (admittedly) few lesbian romances I've read in the past few years. One I'd be interested to hear from lesbian romance writers about.


• Because lesbian romances have fewer, or less hot, sex scenes?

Again, far from any sort of expert on this topic myself; would love to hear from lesbian romance readers about their perception of how the portrayal of sex in their romances has changed (or not) over the years...



• Because I'm uncomfortable, if not outright homophobic, when it comes to lesbian sex? Or, to put it more kindly, I'm more turned on/interested by sex scenes where at least one male (my primary object of sexual interest) appears?

Could well be.



My goal for 2016 is to more actively seek and out and read lesbian romance. Would love to hear your recommendations...


And a question for of you: heterosexual readers who enjoy reading m/m romance, do you read lesbian romance, too? If you don't, do any of the possibilities I've mentioned above sound like the reason why? What other reasons might you not seek or enjoy out lesbian romances?

LGBTQ readers, do you read lesbian romance? Why or why not?